Endonym and exonym

• 1. Introduction

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  Endonym and exonym are the two sides of every place name on earth. One word comes from within; the other arrives from outside. Consider Deutschland. To the people who live there, that is the name of their country. To speakers of English, it is Germany. To speakers of Polish, it is Niemcy. To Finnish and Estonian speakers, different names again. A single nation, a dozen names, and every one of them carrying a story about who named it and why.

  These terms have a formal history. Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, first introduced the word exonym in his 1957 work The Rendering of Geographical Names. The word endonym came later, built from the same Greek root onomá, meaning name, with the prefix éndon, meaning within. The word autonym means the same thing as endonym but comes from the prefix autós, meaning self. Exonym pairs ónoma with éxo, meaning outside. Xenonym pairs it with xénos, meaning foreign. Linguist James Matisoff introduced autonym into academic use, and it was he who offered some of the sharpest observations about why people name others the way they do.

  Why do outsiders reach for different words than insiders? And what happens when a name carried for centuries collides with a group's wish to be called by their own term?

• 2. The Anatomy of a Name

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  Toponyms, anthroponyms, and glossonyms form the three main categories scholars use to sort endonyms and exonyms. Toponyms cover place names. Anthroponyms cover the names of peoples and individuals, including ethnonyms for ethnic groups and demonyms for local populations. Glossonyms cover language names.

  The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names offers precise definitions for toponyms. An endonym, in their formulation, is the name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language of the area where that feature is located. An exonym is any name used in a different language for a feature outside the area where that language is spoken, when that name differs from the local official form. India, China, Egypt, and Germany are all English-language exonyms. The corresponding endonyms are Bharat, Zhongguo, Masr, and Deutschland, respectively.

  For language names, the same logic applies. Chinese, German, and Dutch are English-language exonyms for what speakers of those languages call Zhongwen, Deutsch, and Nederlands.

• 3. How Exonyms Form

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  Phonetic drift is one of the oldest engines behind the creation of exonyms. A place name crosses a language boundary, gets reshaped by the sounds available to the new speakers, and emerges in a form that still faintly echoes the original. London, whose Latin precursor was Londinium, shows this in dozens of languages. French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque speakers say Londres. Dutch and Afrikaans speakers say Londen. Italians and Romanians say Londra. Finnish speakers say Lontoo. Welsh speakers say Llundain. Maori speakers, whose language has only one liquid consonant, arrived at Ranana.

  Translation is a second route. The Netherlands, called Nederland in Dutch, was rendered literally by German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian speakers, all of whom coined variants meaning Low Countries. The Dutch endonym is singular; most of the translated exonyms are plural, a quiet grammatical divergence that persists across the continent.

  A third route is borrowing from a third language entirely. Some Slovene exonyms, such as Dunaj for Vienna and Benetke for Venice, are native coinages. But the Avar name for Paris, Parizh, was borrowed from Russian, which had it from Polish, which had it from Italian Parigi. The chain of transmission can be traced through languages that had no direct contact with the place at all.

  Many English exonyms for continental European cities arrived via French: Belgrade, Bucharest, Cologne, Florence, Milan, Munich, Naples, Prague, Rome, and Seville all passed through French before settling into English usage.

• 4. The Pejorative Edge

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  James Matisoff observed that an in-group's name for itself often equates the group's name with mankind in general. The flip side, he noted, is a human tendency toward neighbors to be pejorative rather than complimentary, especially where there is a real or fancied difference in cultural level between the ingroup and the outgroup.

  The Slavic word for Germans, from which modern forms such as the Ukrainian nimtsi and Russian nemtsy descend, most likely derives from the plural of a root meaning mute. Slavic speakers called their Germanic neighbors people who could not speak the language. The term was later borrowed into Hungarian, Romanian, and Ottoman Turkish, where it referred specifically to Austria. One theory about the origin of the word Slav runs in the opposite direction: it traces back to a root meaning word or speech, so that the Slavs were, in their own naming, the speaking ones in contrast to the mute Germans.

  Among Indigenous American names, the pattern repeats. Apache most likely comes from a Zuni word for enemy. Sioux is an abbreviated form of Nadouessioux, probably from a Proto-Algonquian root meaning foreign-speaking. Comanche comes from the Ute word kimantsi, meaning enemy or stranger. Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning ancient enemies; contemporary Puebloans prefer the term Ancestral Puebloan, and its use is now actively discouraged.

  The ancient Greeks called all non-Greeks barbarians, a term that eventually became the origin of the exonym Berber. Romani people have long faced the exonyms Gypsy, derived from a misbelief that Romani originated in Egypt, and the French term bohemien, derived from Bohemia. Both are widely considered pejorative, and Romani people generally prefer the endonym Romani.

• 5. Official Campaigns for Endonyms

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  Governments have periodically intervened to replace foreign exonyms with endonyms, and the record of success is mixed. In 1935, Reza Shah asked foreign nations to use Iran rather than Persia in official correspondence. The country had been called Iran internally since the time of the Sassanid Empire, which lasted from 224 to 651 CE, while the name Persia descended from the Greek Persis, referring to a single province now known as Fars.

  In 1939, Siam changed its name to Thailand, though the adjective Siamese survived in English as the name for a breed of cat, a breed of fish, and conjoined twins. Ceylon changed its name to Sri Lanka in 1972, though Ceylon was retained as the name for a type of tea. In 1985, Cote d'Ivoire asked that its French name be used in all languages instead of translations like Ivory Coast; the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee complied, but in most non-Francophone countries the French version has not entered everyday speech. German speakers still say die Elfenbeinküste, Spanish speakers say Costa de Marfil, Italians say Costa d'Avorio.

  In November 1995, India officially changed the English name of Bombay to Mumbai. Ukraine has pressed for Kyiv over Kiev, arguing that Kiev derived from the Russian name Kiyev. Belarus sought to displace Byelorussia, with considerable success in English, though dozens of European languages continue to use their own literal translations of White Russia. In December 2021, a circular from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey ordered the use of Turkiye in official communications regardless of language.

  Istanbul itself is a telling case. The name was changed in Turkish between 1923 and 1930 to break with the city's Greek past, yet Greek speakers still call it Constantinople. Istanbul may itself derive from Constantinople, and before that the city was known in Greek as Byzantion, named after its mythical founder Byzas.

• 6. Pinyin and the Chinese Example

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  China's adoption of Hanyu Pinyin as the standard romanisation system, declared in 1979, triggered one of the most sweeping shifts in exonym usage in modern history. Beijing, Qingdao, and the province of Guangdong replaced older English forms in most formal contexts. Yet older exonyms cling on in compounds: Peking duck, Peking opera, Peking University, the beer brand Tsingtao, and Canton as a term in textile trade.

  Some traditional English exonyms are not Mandarin-based at all. Amoy, the old English name for Xiamen, is closer to the Hokkien pronunciation than to any Mandarin form. The adoption of Beijing by English-language media produced a curious side effect: many English speakers began pronouncing the j as the French or Russian zh sound, a hyperforeignism that introduced a sound not present in the Chinese original.

  In mainland China, one exception to Pinyin standardisation is the province name Shaanxi, which uses a mixed spelling drawn from the older Gwoyeu Romatzyh system. The reason is practical: if Pinyin rules applied uniformly, Shaanxi and the neighboring province Shanxi would be spelled identically, because their pronunciations differ only in tone, and English does not mark tones.

  In Singapore, the government encouraged Hanyu Pinyin spellings during the 1980s as part of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, but the effort was costly and unpopular, and the changes stopped by the 1990s. The neighbourhood now called Yishun was named after the Teochew-Peranakan businessman Lim Nee Soon, and the surrounding roads, constituency, and army camp still bear the old spelling Nee Soon, stranded next to the Pinyin placename. In South Korea, the government officially changed the Chinese name of Seoul in 2006, replacing the Joseon-era exonym Hancheng with Shoul, a change that has since been adopted within China.

• 7. When Exonyms Persist and When They Fade

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  The United Nations Statistics Division acknowledged that early ambitions to rapidly reduce the number of exonyms proved over-optimistic. The reason, in their assessment, is that many exonyms have become ordinary words in a language and can be seen as part of that language's cultural heritage. Replacing them is not a technical act but a social one.

  In multilingual cities such as Brussels, an exonym can actually serve a diplomatic purpose. Because Brussels is split between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking communities, the English exonym Brussels sidesteps the question of whether to favor Brussel or Bruxelles, neither of which is neutral to local residents.

  Some endonyms create genuine practical difficulties. A language may lack the sounds needed to render an endonym at all; Maori, with its single liquid consonant, is one example from the source. An endonym may be an unwritten language with no standardised spelling. It may be a plural noun that resists adjectival use in English. In some cases a misspelled endonym may cause more offence than a respectful established exonym.

  The city of Livorno illustrates how significance drives exonym formation. English merchants and, by the 18th century, the British Navy depended on it as an Italian port, so it acquired the English name Leghorn. Nearby Rapallo, a minor port on the same coast, never attracted enough outside attention to earn an exonym at all. The German city of Cologne preserves in its name the Latin colonia, even as German speakers shifted to Koln; Italian and Spanish kept the Latin form while German moved away from it.